Violence Is A Universal Language: International Action Trash On Streaming Services

This thread is exclusively for discussion of hyper-violent action movies and TV shows on streaming services. If you don't worship Iko Uwais, Andrew Koji, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian, Sami Bouajila, et al., this may not be the spot for you.

Perfect thread name. I am here to learn!

Raid 2 is so good if folks haven’t seen that. The car fight scenes are sublime.

Both Raid movies are available as a 2 Blu-Ray set. I bought it on eBay the other day but it hasn't arrived yet.

I wish there was a physical version of The Night Comes For Us, but it's only streaming on Netflix. That movie is fucking savage.

Leo probably my fav Indian action spectacular from last year - super silly "mistaken identity...or is it???" conceit, satanic rituals, the first gang of baddies are sadistic to an insane degree that it feels like a 70's Italian film. It's also basically a remake of A History Of Violence. Same director's Kaithi is even better: darker, less sprawling, just one of the most tense films I've ever seen, "Wages Of Fear meets Assault On Precinct 13" would be the blithe capsule review.

Most South Korean action strikes me as classy rather than trashy (ambigous feelings on the idea of action cinema being "trash" anyway, even in a celebratory tone), but the Roundup series has a sort of blue collar vibe that I don't see much in other cinema from that country, rich with class analysis though it is. Ma Dong-seok just boxes and bullies his way through these, great fun.

The Lost Bullet films from France are very good, refreshingly devoid of any post-Besson winking.

Big recommendation for Furie (haven’t seen the sequel yet)

I watched The Bouncer tonight, a 2018 movie by Julien Leclercq starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, looking very weathered. He plays an ex-bodyguard turned bouncer living in semi-seclusion in Belgium who gets roped into working for a counterfeiter. I liked Van Damme's 80s movies, but his late-career turn toward the darkness in the Universal Soldier sequels and this movie is really something to see. Sami Bouajila is in this one, but he's the antagonist, not the hero. Some really good fights, and there's a nice car chase/shootout in an underground parking garage (with Van Damme at the wheel).

It's on Freevee through Amazon, so there were about five commercial breaks but none longer than 90 seconds and they were placed with some logic.

Sounds good... have you seen JCVD?

At the risk of classing it up, The Vulture's Stunts of the Year awards: https://www.vulture.com/article/stunt-awards-2024.html?origSession=D231121YlHQFpLcsD%2FW40B56qE9VO3LzRKKo93swm8FIDTizn0%3D

Also includes Vimeo links to the sequences in question

i'm watching The Tourist series on Netflix. digging it so far. mystery, intrigue, blood.

i like House Of Ninjas too on Netflix. but i haven't finished it yet.

Started watching a really pretty bad movie called The Bricklayer on Netflix last night — an ultra-clichéd "grizzled veteran spy/superman returns for One Last Mission to take out his former best friend turned hated enemy" story, starring Aaron Eckhart for some reason — and partway through I started looking for info about it and holy hell, this thing was directed by Renny Harlin! I didn't make it to the end, but what I have seen so far is wildly uneven. Like, there's one really well-crafted fight scene, but two really poorly edited ones, and the script really feels like one of those old joke tweets about "I fed 1000 action movies into AI and here's what it coughed up". Eckhart delivers all his lines like he's making fun of Christian Bale as Batman, and all the other actors seem like second choices made because they couldn't afford who they actually wanted. I've only got about 20 minutes left so I'll probably blast through it sometime today, but man, I can't recommend it.

speaking of directors falling off a cliff, i watched Fear The Night the other day and didn't even realize it was directed by he-man playwright and director neil labute. he mostly just directs t.v. now. it could have been directed by a robot outfitted with nothing but chatgpt. it starred action star Maggie Q who could have been played by a hologram of a brick given how little charisma she had. it was yet another *storm the house but oh no the bad guys didn't count on ex-marine sassy peterson...blah blah* movies. which i'm fine with and i have watched a million of them but this was bad. it was no The Wrath of Becky.

I made it to the end of The Bricklayer and it actually managed to get worse. There are several scenes in which dialogue was clearly looped in after a test edit (watching on headphones makes ADR shit really obvious) and even then the writing is barely adequate. There is one great scene where one character absolutely destroys another character's hand with a sledgehammer, though. Kinda worth seeing it just for that.

I mean the Harpers piece about the destruction of Hollywood today was pretty great but if a side effect is that no-marks like Harlin and Labute are just doing this shit all day rather than otherwise bothering us then I'll look for the upside.

So tonight I watched Trigger Warning, a Netflix action movie starring Jessica Alba(!) as ""a Special Forces commando [who] uncovers a dangerous conspiracy when she returns to her hometown looking for answers into her beloved father's death". I was expecting formulaic dumbness, even laughability, but it was actually pretty good! Solid fight scenes, semi-believable plot, a good villain who doesn't get more backstory than he deserves. Alba's the executive producer, and chose the director, an Indonesian woman named Mouly Surya, who made a movie in 2017 that I really kinda want to check out now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg_W1bRshIk

Here's a video that Alba and Surya made about the fight choreography and Alba's training:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKzDou3N2eU

i watched that tonight. i didn't love it but i like her and i liked her knife fighting. i mean it was kinda formulaic dumbness. she should just make netflix movies with that same character.

i loved this movie on netflix but nobody on ilx will watch it. i've seen it twice! not straight-up genre action, but plenty of action that's for sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpUmkzx5zqw

I've got that one in my queue; I read a good review of it somewhere, maybe RogerEbert.com?

Marlina the Murderer is very solid